Iranian official admits detainees were tortured

Iran

Robert F. Worth, New York Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, August 9, 2009

Detained French lecturer Clotilde Reiss defends herself during a hearing at a revolutionary court in Tehran on August 8, 2009. Reiss was in the dock with Iranian protesters being tried in Tehran for opposing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, official media said. AFP PHOTO/FARS NEWS/ALI RAFIEI (Photo credit should read ALI RAFIEI/AFP/Getty Images) less

Detained French lecturer Clotilde Reiss defends herself during a hearing at a revolutionary court in Tehran on August 8, 2009. Reiss was in the dock with Iranian protesters being tried in Tehran for opposing ... more

Photo: ALI RAFIEI, AFP/Getty Images

Photo: ALI RAFIEI, AFP/Getty Images

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Detained French lecturer Clotilde Reiss defends herself during a hearing at a revolutionary court in Tehran on August 8, 2009. Reiss was in the dock with Iranian protesters being tried in Tehran for opposing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, official media said. AFP PHOTO/FARS NEWS/ALI RAFIEI (Photo credit should read ALI RAFIEI/AFP/Getty Images) less

Detained French lecturer Clotilde Reiss defends herself during a hearing at a revolutionary court in Tehran on August 8, 2009. Reiss was in the dock with Iranian protesters being tried in Tehran for opposing ... more

Photo: ALI RAFIEI, AFP/Getty Images

Iranian official admits detainees were tortured

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A top judiciary official acknowledged Saturday that some detainees arrested after postelection protests had been tortured in Iranian prisons, the first such acknowledgment by a senior Iranian official.

Meanwhile, a second day of hearings was held in a mass trial of reformers and election protesters, with more than 100 people accused of trying to topple the government. The accused included a French researcher and employees of the French and British Embassies, prompting angry responses from Britain, France and the European Union.

But even as the trial appeared to further the campaign by the hard-line establishment to intimidate and silence the opposition, at the expense of alienating Iranian moderates and the West, the statement on torture by the judiciary official, Iran's prosecutor general, revealed continued divisions within the government.

Speaking to reporters at a news conference, Qorbanali Dori-Najafabadi, the prosecutor general, said "mistakes" had led to a few "painful accidents which cannot be defended, and those who were involved should be punished."

Such mistakes, he said, included "the Kahrizak incident," a reference to the deaths of several detainees at Kahrizak detention center in southwestern Tehran.

His comments came after weeks of reports that detainees had been tortured, and they fell somewhere between an admission and an accusation, as most of the arrests were made by the Revolutionary Guards and the paramilitary Basij militia, groups that are not under the control of the judiciary.

Even so, the statement was likely to be incendiary in Iran, where allegations of torture by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi became a central justification of the 1979 revolution that brought the hard-line clerics to power.

Detainees' accusations of torture have already prompted a parliamentary investigation of abuses at Kahrizak, which was closed last month by order of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Dori-Najafabadi said his team had tried to change the situation after taking control of the arrests last month, the ILNA news agency reported, and he encouraged people to come forward with complaints.

Inside the courtroom, the French researcher and an analyst at the British Embassy who have been accused of spying took the stand to apologize, saying they had only wanted to update their embassies on Iran's recent political turmoil.